Englishman in New York

Where was I? Oh yes, miserable in Del Rio.

We woke in the morning and called ahead to the park to find out how bad the storms would be. The woman on the other end of the phone didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

“I’m standing in Del Rio and all I can see are dark clouds and the weather says a storm is coming,” I said.

“Well I can see the sun from here,” she replied. “Our forecast says there a 20 percent chance of rain and when they say 20 percent that means it won’t rain at all. You should just come on down here.”

So we did. A couple of hundred miles down the road we turned left at Marathon, the clouds cleared and what did we see just before we entered the park? Cowboys.

Sofie got very excited. I played it cool. Well, as cool as you can when you perform a U-turn on a narrow road, park up and start waving and taking photographs.

Big Bend National Park is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen and neither a camera nor words can do it justice. Imagine a mountain chain formed by a series of volcanic eruptions, where buzzards constantly circle overhead and the mountains turn red and blue at sunrise and sunset; in between they are a constant, unforgiving yellow. At times it felt like a Jurassic Park.

The place is teeming with life, with all sorts of animals hemmed in by the encroaching desert. In just a couple of days we saw buzzards, red-tailed hawks, road runners, a gopher, turtles, a type of wild pig called a javelina, a type of Afghan mountain sheep which was set loose in the State park for some reason I forget and has since thrived, and a friendly skunk who visited our campsite twice. On our first full day we attempted a short 4.8 miles round trip up a mountain called the Lost Mine Trail and a quarter of the way up I took one step off the trail to take a closer look at a cactus and up popped a family of deer.

We stood looking at each other for a good couple of minutes then moved on up the trail. My picture doesn’t do the view any sense of justice. But let’s just say that you know you are in Texas when you get to the top of a mountain and sit down to eat your sandwiches and a woman on a rock nearby says purposefully: “Thank you Lord, for the privilege of being able to sit close to you.”

Amen to that. More next week.

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